Samantha Allen considers the first image of a free Chelsea Manning, and how the prison where she was kept policed her gender expression. [The Daily Beast]

Both Adam Szymczyk, curator of the upcoming documenta 14, and Christine Macel, curator of this year’s cheeseball Venice Biennale, included their lovers in their respective shows. Scandal or common practice? [artnet News]

There are few topics more depressing than the death of a whale. Yet that’s the topic of Lukas Hofmann’s show Enzyme, which opens tonight at Paris’ Galerie Frangulyan. If you’re in town, go cry, I guess. [AQNB]

Chiba-based businessman Yusaku Maezawa just dropped a record-breaking $110.5 million on a 1982 Basquiat painting at Sotheby’s. It’s the most ever paid at an auction for work by an American artist. The good news in this story? It’s going to live at the art museum in the buyer’s hometown. [ARTnews]

Valse Kunst Museum in Vledder, The Netherlands is a museum dedicated to forgeries. The museum was started by jilted Dutch collectors, who of course made lemons out of lemonade, and now houses plenty of convincing knockoffs of masterpieces. This is awesome. [The Boston Globe]

83-year-old activist and artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz will receive a medal for his contributions to Chicano culture at a ceremony in UCLA. Ortiz is known for “destructivist” art, in which he literally destroys household items as sculpture. I’m kinda hoping he chops the medal in half with an axe on stage as soon as he gets it! [UCLA Newsroom]

Here’s a very useful guide to applying to New York’s Affordable Housing Lottery. Though with odds like these, you might as well apply for the actual lottery and just become a millionaire like anyone paying current market-rate rents in Manhattan. [Curbed]

Cara Ober is basically the only writer I know who seems to have actually enjoyed Venice this year. Apparently the secret is pregaming with a spritz! Note to self… [BmoreArt]

Andrew Berman Architects have added a beautiful extension to the The New York Public Library’s Stapleton branch. My first thought: I could read here all day. My second thought: the acoustics of all these hard surfaces combined with the volume of Staten Island conversations will probably make this reading room unusable to all but the deaf. [Dezeen]

Mass MoCA’s gigantic $65m expansion enables the museum to house long-term, large scale installations. The first batch includes a 15-year commission from Jenny Holzer, a 25-year James Turrell show, a 15-year Laurie Anderson radio station, and a 15-year exhibition of a massive Louise Bourgeois sculpture, among others. For a destination museum, this seems like a smart move. [The Art Newspaper]

It was close to midnight when my phone started lighting up last week. James Comey, the head of the FBI, was fired and the freak out was almost immediate. I felt lucky to be in Italy. A buffer from US news was necessary to maintain any kind of focus on the Venice Biennale, not to mention one’s sanity. And yet, even from this distance, the turmoil back home certainly drove home one point: Art isn’t going to save democracy. Art has no impact on Donald Trump’s actions, the FBI, or any of the Republicans in the senate and congress. People can call their representatives. Art cannot.

All of which is to say, the art professional who believes artists are magical unicorns who will save us all is looking increasingly silly. And so, visiting this year’s Venice Biennale Viva Art Viva curated by Christine Macel, which begins with the premise that artists will shape the world to come, felt a bit like walking through a United Way commercial. The upside of this: the 2017 Biennale more diverse than many of its predecessors. The downside: diversity isn’t of much value if the show is bad.

What’s the best way to understand art? One tactic is to see a lot of it. Another is to spend time with artists. And yet another is to curate an entire show around the idea that artist practices are God’s gift to the world and include as many studios, meditations on studios, and virtual studio renderings as humanly possible. Guess which approach Biennale curator Christine Macel takes in the Giardini section. A look at the show below. Arsenale pics here.

We’ve spent the better part of a day looking at the Venice Biennale’s exhibition, “Viva Arte Viva”. Curated by Christine Macel and described as a Biennale designed “with artists, by artists and for artists”, the show amounts to a love letter addressed to artists. Studios have been transported, materials worshipped, and methodologies examined. Weaving as a metaphor for making, togetherness, and life, is completely and utterly ubiquitous. The sincerity of it all can be a bit much. But more on that later. A look at the Arsenale section of the show below.

Opera singer Dmitri Hvorostovsky retired from his singing career in 2015 when he learned he would need to be treated for a brain tumor. He made a surprise return to the Met Opera’s gala concert last night, though, which is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Met’s home at Lincoln Center. What a performance. [The New York Times]

Looks like one recommendation of New York’s cultural plan is a major redistribution of funds, so that the smaller organizations focused on diversity get more money and the giant institutions receive less. This is a good start. [The New York Times]

artnet News’s new columnist, Tim Schneider, discusses my report on new commission agreements between artists and gallerists in the emerging field. He takes issue of Muriel Guepin’s model of taking all the profit at an art fair until her costs are covered. I agree that this model isn’t one that should be emulated, but a 60/40 split at an art fair only doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me. Fairs are really expensive, and at the lower end of the market, its really difficult for galleries to recoup their costs. Perhaps the art fairs are the real fat cats here? [artnet News]

This picture of Martha Stewart giving Donald Trump the bird at Frieze is hilarious. She’s standing between Andres Serrano photographs we deemed terrible of Trump and Snoop Dog. [e-online]

The University of Montana School of Art is offering a fully online Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art. I suspect studio art only means graphic design, but still—is there any way this isn’t a total sham? [kpax]

John Waters will show “weirdly Baltimore-based” art at The Venice Biennale this year. (More sign art.) The show opens Wednesday and we’ll be there. [The Baltimore Sun]

Christine Macel, the chief curator at of the Pompidou Center in Paris and this year’s Venice Biennale will be focusing on art by artists and for artists, not politics. [The New York Times]